At the beginning of 2012, I went through my normal
goal-setting exercise to help me plan out my running year. I like to set at least one goal that I know
will be challenging, but difficult. This
year the challenge goal was to attempt to run one marathon each calendar month.
As I worked towards achieving this goal, I discovered that I
truly love to run in these events. I
also have learned not to fear the distance.
Although it’s always tough to complete 26.2 miles of running, I’ve always
managed to do it (sometimes with more difficulty than others). During my planning for the second half of the
year, I searched for a race in early September, and found the Bozeman
Marathon. As I reviewed various sites
about Bozeman, I realized that another marathon would be held the day before –
the Salmon Marathon – and that these two races were fairly close. Bozeman is in Montana, and Salmon is in
Idaho. This intrigued me. Could I “do a double”? I wasn’t scared of running one marathon, but
running back-to-back marathons was unknown territory for me. I knew that plenty of others had done it, but
would my legs hold out? These two
marathons are both small events and relatively low-cost, and I could run them
both on a single airfare, so I decided to sign up and go for it. I figured that if I got to race weekend and
felt totally unprepared, I could simply opt out of one of them without too much
loss.
Training for my double was a little different than
normal. I scheduled some weekends to
have two longer runs, and after my July marathon (San Francisco) and my August
marathon (Anchorage), I didn’t take it quite so easy the week after the
race. Generally speaking, I felt about
as ready as I could be with the limited mileage that normally fills my
log. What I did not count on, though,
was the fact that by early August, most of Montana and Idaho seemed to be
burning down! And they kept burning,
right through race weekend. A couple of
days before the race, the Salmon race director sent an e-mail offering participants
the right to defer registration to next year.
The hotel called and asked if I wanted to cancel (turns out the
firefighters needed rooms and the government was offering to pay a higher
rate). Thus it was that as my plane
dropped down to the Bozeman airport on September 6th, my eyes began
to sting and I could smell smoke. This
was bad – so bad, in fact, that the weather forecasts for both areas called for
“Areas smoke”:
Many of my friends advised me not to run, saying the risk to
health was not worth it. I decided to go
anyway, since I had paid for a flight, and to make the decision on-site.
There were several other people in the Marathon Maniacs
group who were racing either one or both events, and we had been chatting
online in the days leading up to the events.
The Maniacs is a super group of folks, and some of us decided it would
be sensible to share some costs and help each other out a bit. I picked up my race packet on Friday, and
also picked up David H.’s packet, then drove back to the airport to meet up
with him. We split a rental car and
drove together over to Salmon, ID. It
was beautiful country to drive through – tons of wide open spaces and plenty of
heavily forested land. Unfortunately as
we crossed the border the smoke was getting much thicker. By the time we were on the State highway
leading into Salmon, the smoke was almost too much and we passed National Guard
personnel who were protecting evacuated ranches, and the largest camp of
firefighters I’ve ever seen (I later read that there were over 1,000 stationed
at that base). It grew dark like
twilight even though it was mid-day. It
was depressing to think that this area and all of the wildlife that must live
there were under such an extreme threat.
This photo shows the smoke, but I think it was much worse than the photo
reveals.
Saturday morning got off to a nice start. The weather was nice and cool, and a
beautiful conjunction of the moon and Jupiter graced the early sky. The hotel provided a nice breakfast, and then
we all climbed aboard school busses for the trip to the start line. The starting area for the marathon is next to
a one-room schoolhouse on a dirt road that seems to be in the middle of
nowhere, and the school was open for runners to keep warm. The school kids had drawn pictures and
written precious notes of encouragement (and some warnings) to the runners,
which was probably the most awesome pre-race motivation I’ve ever seen!
The course was point-to-point, and starts at close to 5,000
feet elevation. The vast majority of the
course was rocky dirt road. In a
fortunate twist of fate, the winds had blown most of the smoke in an opposite
direction from us so it wasn’t too bad, although I could still taste and smell
some slight smoke. When the gun went
off, about 100 marathoners took off; apparently, about 50 or so had accepted
the deferral option to next year. Within
a few minutes I was basically on my own, and it stayed that way for almost the
entire race. The course was net
downhill, with about a 1,000 foot net drop, but rolling hills kept things interesting. It also became obvious early on that the
rocks in the road required careful foot placement, and occasionally a rock
would fly up or my heel would scrape the opposite ankle. I wasn’t wearing trail shoes, and my normal
Mizuno’s have a tendency to lock a rock into the gap on the bottom beneath the
heel, which happened several times. But
the scenery was so amazingly beautiful, with farms interspersed with wilderness
and streams, that I felt quite happy on the run.
I never hit the wall, but did slow in the final mile when
the dirt switched to asphalt and the course entered the small town of
Salmon. I had been alone for so long
that I committed a classic racing mistake and assumed nobody was near me. Much to my surprise, another racer caught me
as I approached the finish line, and while I did have some energy available I
decided not to go all out with a kick because I knew I had another race to run
the next day. So he passed me just
before the line, beat me fair and square by 1 second. I congratulated him and within a short time
we were friends, and discovered that we were both from Arizona and run some of
the same races! It was worth getting
beat. I still managed to get 10th
place overall, crossing the line in 3:19:49.
The age groups were 10-year, and surprisingly the top 2 racers were in
that group, plus the guy who outkicked me also was, so I got 4th in
my age group. But they took the overall
winners out of age groups (I love it when race directors don’t allow
double-dipping!) so I earned a 2nd place trophy. The awards were very nice metal sculpture
trophies of a jumping salmon!
My friend David was only a few minutes behind, and we
enjoyed watching more of our maniac friends finishing. After the awards ceremony, it was time for a
quick clean-up followed by the 4 hour drive back up to Bozeman. Normally I don’t recommend taking a 4 hour
drive immediately after a marathon, but we had to get back in time to rest up
for the next day’s event. We loaded up
on pizza in Bozeman for dinner, and I tried my best to keep my legs as loose as
possible.
The air in Bozeman was a little cleaner on Sunday morning
but looking at surrounding mountaintops made it obvious that there was still
some smoke. The runners gathered in
front of the Bozeman Running Company shop to wait for the shuttle bus, and
several of us who had run Salmon the day before compared stories. It’s funny how common challenges can so
quickly bond people together – marathoners who I had never heard of just 24
hours earlier now were my lifelong friends.
The bus was loaded and we made the long drive out of town to
the race start. It was chilly, but none
of us were prepared for the strong winds that met us when we exited the
bus. Fortunately, the race was small
enough that there was no mad rush to drop off gear check bags, so most of us
waited until the last possible minute before stripping off our warmup clothes
and throwing the bag into the trailer.
During the wait, I met a few more Marathon Maniacs, including one 67
year old who holds the world record for most official marathons run in a single
year (113), Larry Macon. Although both
Bozeman and Salmon were small events, I made more friends than I ever have at
the big races! Here’s a photo of the
start area, which was quite scenic:
When the gun went off, my legs felt a bit stiff and we were
running uphill, but the wind was at our backs, which helped. I had to make a porta-pottie stop at mile 2,
but in general I felt better than I expected.
I was purposely holding back on the pace – this was totally new for me
and I just did not know if I’d be able to keep running the whole way or
not. The Bozeman course was different
from the day before in several ways.
This one was on paved roads, which were not closed to traffic, so it was
necessary to run on the side. The
scenery was spectacular, but there weren’t many spectators. The course started at about a mile high, and
climbed to about 5,600 feet for the entire first half. It then gradually dropped to finish a bit below
5,000 feet. This photo was taken near
the start:
I tried a new tactic in both races (I know, you should never
try anything new in a marathon, but this whole double marathon concept was new
anyway so it seemed trivial). David
suggested that it’s really not necessary to consume my normal 3-4 gels along
the run, and that drinking the sports drink at aid stations would provide
adequate calories. So on both runs, I
only ate a single gel. I never bonked
and I was able to continue running all the way with no walking on both races,
so I may continue to use this technique in the future as I find it difficult to
do much eating while running.
Although I didn’t bonk, I did eventually run low on energy
in Bozeman. I also had trouble with the
continual running on the side of the road.
Running on a slant eventually becomes very rough on the legs, and I felt
it. Bozeman had a larger field of over
400 runners, so I was never totally alone but most of the time I wasn’t part of
a group either. By mile 24 or so I was
eager to get this one wrapped up, and as we came in to the city and passed the
university, it seemed like the auto traffic increased and the road camber got
much worse. I finally turned on to the
main street and ran the final stretch to cross the finish line in 3:41:19.
I was 25th overall, and was excited to learn that
I placed 2nd in my age group.
David also got 2nd in his age group, so we hung around for
the awards ceremony. We were
disappointed to learn that they only gave awards for 1st place! But that did not dampen my excitement level
from knowing that I had just completed two marathons in two days, something I
would not have even considered possible for me at the beginning of the year. The weekend’s races also qualified me under
two different criteria for a Iridium ranking in the Marathon Maniacs, and were
the 10th and 11th states that I’ve run a marathon in,
which qualified me for entry into the 50 States Marathon Club, as well as the
50 Sub 4 Club. Being in these clubs
isn’t a pride thing, it’s about joining up with other marathon enthusiasts,
making new friends around the world, and helping each other out. I came home with a couple of new race medals
and a nice trophy, but I also came home with some wonderful new friends that I
know I’ll be seeing again soon!
